CURRENT AFFAIRS UPDATE: PM Dedicates Gandhi Heritage Portal to the Nation Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh here today dedicated the Gandhi Heritage Portal to the nation. The Minister of Culture Smt. Chandresh Kumari Katoch, Communications & IT Minister Shri Kapil Sibal, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations Dr. Sam Pitroda, Shri Narayan Desai, Shri Kartikeya Sarabhai and Secretary, Ministry of Culture Shri Ravindra Singh were also present on the occasion. With this dedication, the Ministry of Culture, Government of India has created a Portal to review the message of non-violence to the world at large as well as to the youth of our country, besides highlighting critical aspects of our freedom struggle and Gandhiji’s message and humanism. The Gandhi Heritage Sites Panel had made two recommendations towards preservation, protection and dissemination of the tangible and the intangible heritage of Mahatma Gandhi. Specifically one of the 2 recommendations was setting up of the Gandhi Heritage Sites Mission and the other was the development of a Gandhi Heritage Portal to disseminate Gandhiji’s writings in an authentic and unabridged form. The Ministry of Culture has fulfilled both these recommendations. The Ministry of Culture earlier gave the responsibility of the concept design, development and maintenance of the Gandhi Heritage Portal to the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust, Ahmedabad and provided them a corpus grant of Rs 7.50 crore for this purpose. The Sabarmati Ashram is the largest repository of Gandhiji’s original writings and has a photo archive of over 6,000 images of Gandhiji and his associates. It also has a substantial library of over 45,000 books on and about Gandhiji and the Indian National Movement. The Gandhi Heritage Portal is conceptualised around The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. It has placed the collected works in three languages: English 100 volumes, Hindi 97 volumes and Gujarati 82 volumes. These volumes are interlinked to provide easy movement from one text and language to the other. The key texts provide first editions of (when possible) of Key Texts of Gandhiji. These are: Hind Swaraj, Satyagraha in South Africa, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, From YervadaMandir, Ashram Observances in Action, Constructive Programmes: Their Meaning and Place, Key To Health and Gandhiji’s translation of the Gita as Anasakti Yoga. The Journals provide electronic versions of Indian Opinion, Navajivan, Young India, etc. A sub-section provides some of the journals which make for a fuller archive of the Gandhian imagination and scholarship. At present the Portal has placed as representation Gandhi Marg (Hindi & English), Bhoomi Putra, PyaraBapu and that unique handwritten journal of the Sataygraha Ashram Madhpudo, which carried Prabhudas Gandhi’s Jivan Nu Parodh and KakasahebKalelkar’sSmaranYatra. The Portal hopes to include many more journals in future. ‘Other Works’ is a section that would take into account the vast and deep commentarial and memoire literature. ‘The Life and Times’ section is under development and would provide slivers of information that could lead one to broader and deeper explorations. The Gallery, likewise, provides audio, visual, film material as also caricatures, paintings and postage stamps. The Portal provides a sample of each of these. ‘The Gandhi Heritage Sites’, the data for which is under development and verification, would provide multiple layers of information regarding places that Gandhiji visited. The Portal has 5 lakh pages of authentic and verified information. This is expected to grow to over 15 lakh pages eventually. With the dedication of the Portal the Ministry of Culture has supported the development of two on-line, web-based archives. Bichitra, the on-line Variorum of the writings of Gurudev RabindraNath Tagore and the Gandhi Heritage Portal are signs of the firm commitment of the Ministry of Culture to help create and sustain an open source archive movement, which democratises access to our intangible cultural and philosophical heritage. These initiatives would strengthen the climate of research and inquiry and would aid and facilitate both teaching and research.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 06:29:28 +0000
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